In the coming year several different lines of research will be undertaken, all of which pertain to the perception and processing of speech at the phonetic level. In one series of experiments, young infants will be tested to determine the extent to which they can appreciate changes in the manner in which various feature values are combined. In a second series of studies, infants will be tested to determine whether they perceive and utilize contextual information (e.g., speaker rate) in their ability to categorize phonetic segments. A third set of studies, using adult listeners, will utilize a selective adaptation procedure with the goal of determining the course of establishment and decay of the selective adaptation effect, thereby providing additional information concerning the operating characteristics of the channels of analysis underlying the perception and processing of speech. A final series of studies will involve investigations of the manner in which the channels of analysis for speech interact during processing. These studies will use a number of methodologies, with the hope that these converging operations will permit stronger statements concerning the nature of speech processing.